An employer pays his/her employee money in exchange for time. For that time an employee traditionally gets told what to do when to do it and within what parameters (job descriptions). There is a degree of control. It’s been a one sided affair for many decades/hundreds of years….perhaps I’m being a little unfair? But on the whole an employee is at the beck and call of us employers….why?

An employer may be giving a salary or a wage but the employee is giving up their time. It’s just as tangible, just as important as money and of equal weight, yet the relationship in many, if not most businesses, is lopsided. In the past that’s because employees had little choice. The employers factory was the only one in town and there were only a few people at the top who provided all of the employment in the surrounding area.

As this real life scenario rapidly dissolves it’s changing the ‘power’, things are becoming a lot more balanced. Employees have more choice. Employment is not provided by two or three heavy weights. Business is changing, we are selling intellect and less materials, we are managing our employees imagination not production lines and the business world around is changing very fast, small businesses themselves are changing but not as fast and the leaders of those small businesses, on the whole, are hardly changing at all.

We still see the employee as ‘ours,’ that they belong to us and that we say what goes. I’m not advocating breaking company rules or values but there is a shift. Employees really can choose where they work. They will increasingly make choices, understand where they fit and will leave quickly when they don’t fit.

Increasingly, small business owners will need to learn how to lead these changes and provide a working environment that is less centred on one person making the decisions. They must stop managing people and start leading, understanding that the employee has more choice than ever before. They can stop working and go travelling, they can stop working and do a degree, they can stop working and have a break from work and worse of all, they can stop working for you and go and work for the competition.

The balance has to be restored. As employers we must recognise that our employees can do a hundred things instead of being where they are with you right now. The relationship must not be lopsided and less based on control, order, authority and more on change, emotion, trust, influence and motivation.

Your people want the following:

1. To be part of something that matters

2. To do meaningful work

3. Be led not managed

4. Authenticity not selfishness

5. Influence not authority

6. Truth and ‘real’

You manage objects, processes, IT systems, procedures, quality, operations. Anything that involves people requires leadership skills, behaviour and attitude. Anything less results in you making your life a lot harder than it needs to be.

Or is it opportunity? No matter. The challenge is to rise above the crisis most of your competitors are talking themselves into, to take advantage of the chaos that is ensuing and be better and greater than your competition, which, lets be frank, is a lot easier nowadays. The challenge is not to be comfortable, not to stand ‘gassing’ in the corridors about the doom and gloom, not to reinforce the misery that many would believe will happen in the New Year but to stand up and be counted. 

Today is about responding not reacting to the problems. Having the courage to look at your business hard, identify where you have been going wrong. Where you haven’t been as effective as you should have been. Not being comfortable with what you’ve got. Rationalise it a little if you have to. Then looking at better ways forward. Has anybody ever got into trouble for embracing the status quo?

Economic crisis makes it difficult for people to hide. If your competitors are even as good as you, at some point they will squash your grapes so to speak! Being good enough ain’t good enough anymore.

The safer your plans for the future, the risker your business strategy is.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while especially in these current interesting times. Apparently it costs 8 - 10 times more to go out and get a new customer compared with retaining an existing one nowadays. Based on this principle, it’s the existing customers that keep us afloat at this time, particularly, if they believe in what you do.

To me it’s about loyalty, value, genuineness and sincerity when it comes to the people that your business deals with including employees. True loyalty…..Steve Yastrow in his post below made it all a little clearer!

http://www.tompeters.com/entries.php?rss=1&note=http://www.tompeters.com/blogs/main/010739.php

Over the next few days, perhaps a week or so, I’m going to pick a word at random and post my thoughts on that word and it’s application/relevance to small business in today’s sophisticated, complex and rapidly changing world. I hope it helps small business owners reflect on their business and stimulates some thoughts. Today’s word is ‘ESSENTIAL.’ Told you it was random.

It’s a word used seldom other than by authors in the title of their latest book on improving your business. You’ve seen it… the essential guide to this, the essential rules for that (I know i’ve done it). Well perhaps those books are very useful, they help us prioritise, they condense the abundance of things we have to do into a quick way of dealing with the obvious….but they are changing! The essentials used to be great products, they are a given now. The essentials used to be a well established business, it doesn’t matter any more, the essentials used to be having premises well located, in most cases who gives a damn about that any more. Our priorities have changed substantially, it’s all got a bit human again!

It’s clear how things are panning out…. great customer experiences. I’ve written a lot about this but it’s essential. According to Colin Shaw in his book ‘The DNA of Customer Experience’ 95% of business leaders believe customer experience is the next competitive battleground. It’s no longer good enough to have a great products or a great idea. Engaging, involving and having conversations with your customers is the next phase.

And, ensuring your people are doing meaningful work they are committed to. In fact, I would as far to say your people want to be part of something that matters, where they are energised, free and inspired by what you do. It’s about skill and behaviour not authority and they want to be led not managed.

As I said it’s all got a little human. What’s ‘essential’ in our small business has fundamentally changed. Moving towards a more human to human experience is something small businesses are in a great position to take advantage of. I’m not so sure our corporate competitors have that.

Why? You don’t have all the answers! It’s just as important to recruit, reward and have trouble makers on your team as well as trouble shooters. Engage with not only the reliable people who keep your business ticking over but with the people who are going to radically change it too!

However….. remember to be courageous enough to get rid of those that expend large amounts of energy maintaining the status quo!

I’ve cut and paste an interesting article by Tom Peters that’s shown below. Good point and very true. When was the last time we made our people feel valued?… (I’m talking about more than a pat on the back here and so is he!)

100 WAYS TO SUCCEED/MAKE MONEY
by  Tom Peters

---------------
100 Ways to Succeed/Make Money by Tom Peters. Copyright 2008

by Tom Peters. Licensed under Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0.Click here to view 

the license
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode

—————

100 WAYS TO SUCCEED #74:
C(I) > C(E)

This one waltzed into my life when I was speaking to GE Energy 

sales folks earlier this year. I've long said that "forming relations 

inside our own company is almost as important as the external ones." 

While it may not be at Universal, it struck me that in many cases 

"C(I)"--our Internal customers--are in fact...MORE IMPORTANT...

than C(E)--our external customers. In the GE case, systems sales, 

often to "foreigners," the salesperson (my GE informant who's a very 

successful salesperson) wants "an...UNFAIR SHARE"...of a host 

of insiders' time--engineers, logistics folks, the risk-assessment

staff, and even lawyers. Lots of GE dudes are selling lots of 

stuff--and need, yesterday, lots and lots and lots of Inside Help. 

I (salesperson) want to be at the front of the queue for the 

harried risk-assessment staffers time & attention; I want to be 

head of the queue and getting an unfair share of the engineers', 

who must customize the product, time and imagination and attention.

Hence my full set of "internal [customer] relationships” could end up 

being more important, even far more important, than my "external 

[customer] relations.” The applications of this idea range way 

beyond enormous GE systems sales. I, as a professional services 

person at the "client interface," want an unfair share--and 

posthaste--of the Graphics Department's attention when a hastily 

scheduled Presentation looms. As a junior purchasing staffer, I 

want an unfair share of the Legal Staff's time as I prepare even 

a medium-sized contract. As a White House staffer many moons ago, 

I wanted the various Gatekeepers to put my memo to the VP or P or 

Secretary of State at the front of an infinitely long cue of stuff 

from people who waaaaaay outranked me.

So, what have you done lately for your all-important "portfolio" of
internal...CUSTOMERS????? I(I) + C(I) > I(E) + C(E). My Investment in
Internal Customers must frequently outstrip my Investment in External
Customers. Think about it. Clearly. Precisely. E.g., when was the last 

time you took a C(I) to lunch or dinner? Or brought Flowers to the 

Legal Department after they'd done you even a wee favor?

Is a brand a product, a service, a company or even a person? Is it a logo, a marketing strategy or an attitude or a culture? It’s a question often asked and it’s perhaps understandable why so many small business owners get so frustrated by the lack of a clear definition by the marketing specialists themselves.

It’s an elusive concept, if it’s a concept at all? Naomi Klein in her book ‘No Logo’ provides the most appropriate interpretation of brand as ‘the core meaning of the modern corporation.’ Meaning is the main word here…meaning!!!! I think we can assume she includes small businesses. Brand is something we cannot ignore and should be looking for ideas from. Manchester United, Madonna, Sony, Fairtrade, Mini, VW Camper vans are all strong brands, constantly changing and adapting to market trends.

For me branding is a devolution and communication of your companies core values through an identity, a culture, company assets, specific products/services and through your people. It’s something that is coherent but necessarily consistent and it means something to your customers and employees. What brand does clearly do though is that it encompasses the key point; it’s not what you do, it’s actually how you do it that matters.

Been helping a couple of small businesses with some overwhelming time management issues recently. As usual no time to improve and think about developments for the future because the majority of the staff are engaged in fire fighting. It comes from the ‘top’ and therefore is a problem for the ‘top’ to solve. Time management, I believe, is a cultural issue. It’s no good individuals on their own attempting to manage their time more effectively if other people are not respecting it and adhering to the boundaries or working parameters, great time management requires.

We can work quite inefficiently, we often get distracted by random factors in the working day. We prioritise based on noise but work doesn’t come from thin air, it comes from the commitments we make. We came up with a quite a few exercises to help the process. Here’s one:

1. Make a list of all of the outstanding work you have at the moment. Write down how long the task has been outstanding for and the number of hours it would take to complete the task. When you’ve picked yourself back up off the floor. You now know what your backlog looks like and how big or small it is!

2. Collect a days worth of incoming work. Write it down. You now know what you have to do just to stay on top!

3. Put all of your backlog work into a folder then collect all of your work for one day and deal with it in one batch and do that for three days.

4. Spend the fourth day dealing with your normal incoming work but start the process of clearing one item on that backlog list and do that first thing when you get in the office. Keep doing it until the backlog is gone.

Remember whenever you take on something new, something else has to give.

Stimulating creative thinking in a small business is not the most common thing to do. Most entrepreneurs generally have most of the ideas…or do they??? Once a business has grown to a certain size, not all the answers or great innovation will come from the founder. Quite often us small business owners think we are the fountain of all knowledge.

Challenging the people that work in our business is one of our fundamental roles but how many times a day, week, year do we go out of our way to do it. Creating an environment where our people feel they can spark their imagination and then develop their ideas is crucial to future success. Here’s a few ideas off the top of my head….

1. Recruit people who make you feel uncomfortable, people who will challenge you and your customers

2. Always, always recruit happy people and those that have the right attitude. Technical skill can be learned

3. Set some of your people a task of finding new uses for old ideas

4. Give your newest recruit the oldest problem your business has, then give them the time and resources to solve it. Believe me they will

5. Create a culture that rewards success and failure but doesn’t accept inaction

Don’t forget, great ideas come from the creation of dumb, stupid and impractical ones too!